Late-coming Dothan set to arrive sporting 3G wirelessness

DESPITE THE EARTH MOVING beneath our feet and threats of more such Ezekielesque acts of God in the region, we pick up the tale of our discussions with Intel Israel boss and corporate vice-president, David 'Dadi' Perlmutter.

Anyhow, back in March 2003 we attended the UK launch of Centrino, a swanky affair in the posh Vinopolis winebar-cum-museum located on the south bank of the mighty Thames River.

There, we were regally entertained by Mooly Eden, an Intel Israel engineer close to the project who has since moved to the US and become a somewhat bigger cheese. Mooly's enthusiasm bubbled over to the extent that he claimed the successor to the "Banias" Pentium M chip -- currently powering Intel's Centrino mobile 'solution' -- was very close to completion. Dothan, as the chip is codenamed, subsequently appeared on Intel roadmaps for launch in November last year. November came and went but Dothan didn't.

So, what went wrong? we asked Dadi.

There was, he admits, a "problem with one circuit, which impaired yield and quality. We decided to push it out. Since we had the Centrino with Banias, it was cost-effective to delay the product."

You may have noticed that Intel then made a lot of noise about Centrino and has bombarded us with the message of a wireless future ever since. You can expect the arrival of Dothan and its accompanying (holistic) platform to be the subject of much more trumpetery and marketing moolah.

The delay in its launch, however, seemed to leave Intel with a hole in its product line. We might have expected rival AMD's 64-bit desktop propaganda to have been swallowed up with cries of "irrelevant" as Intel went chasing the bigger bucks connected with portable PCs - low-power, wireless ones, at that.

Some may even have had the temerity to suggest that Intel hurried out a rapidly cooked-up a chip named ExtremE to fill the gap and inhibit its rival's swaggering. This suggestion, when we put it to Dadi, came close to unleashing the full force of the Middle-Eastern temperament held in check by a disciplined demeanour.

"The Extreme Edition was a good product," he insists, arguing that such a product was the result of long research and could not have been cooked up overnight. Competition had, however, on occasion caused Intel "to accelerate" its roadmaps, he says, pointing to other initiatives such as the Digital Home to suggest that Intel hadn't felt the lack of Dothan last autumn as anything like a gaping hole in its armoury.

There's a mantra executives trot out when you ask about the successes of their comptitors. It runs: "Competition drives you do things better. It makes things harder and more difficult but it makes you improve. It's good for the end-user." Dadi knows it off by heart.

"We already had Centrino out there with Banias and that was a good, stable product. We had to make sure it (Dothan) was as good as Banias was. We took the decision to hold it for another quarter to increase the quality and the yield," he says.

"Business in the 21st century is not the same as in the nineties. You cannot improve a product on just one vector. In mobile, you have four vectors. You want no compromise on a desktop performance, you need a small-form factor, lower power and a better battery life. Plus you need wireless capability. You can't achieve all of these with the processor alone."

Dothan, as we know, will increase its performance by adding a 2Mb cache to the Banias design. It also moves to the smaller 90 nanometre die size from a 130nm process, just as Prescott moved the Pentium 4 to a similarly-sized process. The transition improves yields for the chip maker while upping its economies of scale. Our roadmaps suggest it'll be introduced in Q2 at 1.70 and 1.80GHz.

Dadi promises "better benchmarks at same frequency" for the chip. "But, also of course," he adds, we'll be delivering higher frequencies." Although he admits there were "some things we could do better", he refuses to be drawn on specifics.

Dothan sits within the, erm, 'holistic' platform codenamed Sonoma. This incorporates the Alviso chipsets now called Intel 915GM, 915PM and 910GML. Its next wireless kit which supports 802.11a, b, and g is now called PRO/Wireless 2915ABG. We expect the audio specification, previously codenamed Azalia, to be thrown into the mix, though we don't expect 7.1 speakers to be mounted on that many laptops. It's now called Intel High Definition Audio. Intel says the Sonoma setup will feature a new "world class" graphics system.

How the new Centrino incorporating Dothan will be marketed remains under wraps. It'll still be Centrino, of course. As Dadi says, "it will increase the value of the brand we created." Expect to hear more at the upcoming IDF, though we don't think it'll be launched there. After all, Dadi himself won't be there, but we won't read too much into that either. Maybe a similarly shaven-headed Anand Chandrasekher will do the honours.

Anyhow, despite Dothan offering "tune-ups, not new architecture", we can expect its wireless capabilities to be enhanced. Dadi dropped heavy hints about 3G and GPRS capability being added to the mix, extending the wireless capability of the Sonoma platform beyond wireless hotspots.

This might be the most significant development of the Centrino family Sonoma brings to the party. Wireless hotspots are tipping up here and there, of course, and you'd expect it in Intel's Haifa canteen. But now the shopping mall down the road is offering wifi to shoppers -- mainly, Dadi suggests, to lure connected Intel workers there on their lunch breaks.

Future Dothan-powered Centrino notebooks are likely to grab hold of any wireless communications systems running around your head. Billing might be a complicated affair but Intel's vision of a wireless world will move a step closer, thanks largely to Mr Perlmutter and his holistic approach. µ

See also:
Centrino's Dadi discusses offspring